Google's HR boss shares 10 secrets to running a company everyone wants to work for

Since joining Google as its senior vice president of People
Operations in 2006, Laszlo Bock has seen the company transform
into a powerful global company, growing from 6,000
employees to nearly 60,000.

2. Trust your team.

As a manager, you should help guide your employees' progress
and evaluate their performance; you should not micromanage,
excessively monitoring employees to the point of trying to do
their work for them.

This level of trust should work both ways, Bock says. Google has
semiannual performance surveys for employees to anonymously rate
their managers, and managers are strongly encouraged to discuss
the results with their team.

3. Only hire people who are better than you.

"A bad hire is toxic, not only destroying their own performance,
but also dragging down the performance, morale, and energy of
those around them," Bock writes. "If being down a person means
everyone else has to work harder in the short term, just remind
them of the last jerk they had to work with."

A Google employee rides a
bicycle through its Mountain View campus.Justin Sullivan/Getty

4. Keep conversations about development separate from performance
reviews.

If the only time your employees hear feedback on their work is
annual or semiannual performance reviews, they'll begin to
associate criticism with failure, which can hold them back.

Bock suggests regularly speaking with your employees
about their work, and keep performance reviews strictly relegated
to annual goals and whether or not they were met. "If you're
doing this well, the performance discussions will never be a
surprise because you'll have had conversations all along the way,
and the employees will have felt your support at each step," he
says.

5. Pay attention to your best and worst performers.

If you had to put your employees on a bell curve, pay close
attention to the outliers on either side, Bock recommends.

Determine what makes your best
performers excel and have them teach their skills to the rest of
the team.

And look at your worst performers. Remember why you hired them,
and then determine if the role they're in simply isn't tapping
their talent or if they turned out to be a bad fit for the
company. If it's the former, give them a chance to excel with new
responsibilities; if it's the latter, let them go for not only
your team's benefit, but theirs as well.

Save your heavy expenses for the perks that really matter, like
health benefits and retirement plan matching contributions. To
Google, this also means paying a high price for free lunches and
shuttle services, which they have found to be significant enough
to employee well-being that they are worth the money.

Bock explores his
management approach in his book "Work Rules!"Hachette

To understand the logic, think of it like a
professional baseball team. The Detroit Tigers, for example, pay
Justin Verlander $28 million because he's a Cy Young
Award-winning pitcher that they don't want to see on the roster
of another team.

Google has the luxury of a massive war chest to recruit the best
employees away from rivals, but Bock says that the same logic
should apply to smaller companies.

8. Nudge your employees in the right direction.

The best managers don't help their employees develop
desirable behaviors by making demands or forcing change. Lead the
way with subtle gestures, he says.

If, for instance, you'd like to encourage more collaboration
among your employees, you could begin sending team-wide emails
pointing out individuals' successes and ask for ideas on how to
build off them.

9. Ease into change.

You will make mistakes as you try to improve your team's
performance. If you're going to try an experiment, be transparent
about your approach with your employees.

"That will help transform them from critics to supporters, and
they'll extend you more benefit of the doubt if things go awry,"
Bock writes.

10. Keep things fun and innovative.

It's important to realize that there is no such thing as a
perfect team workflow or office culture, and that you will
continually need to experiment and innovate. This doesn't need to
feel like a chore, Bock says.

"What's beautiful about this approach is that a great environment
is a self-reinforcing one: All of these efforts support one
another, and together create an organization that is creative,
fun, hardworking, and highly productive," he writes.